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Although digitalization has become an everyday phenomenon in higher education (HE), there is still limited understanding on how HE teachers experience the digitalized work environment. In this article we utilize narrative research methodology to share HE teachers' voices, addressing the following questions: What is the lived experience of being a teacher in digitalizing higher education? How has digitalization shaped the work environment in higher education? What meaning do HE teachers make of digitalization? The research participants are six university teachers with significant work experience. The findings are reported in the form of a classic tragedy narrative, which reveals that the rise of managerialism and neoliberalization in HE has changed teachers' work and the role of digital tools play in it, and teachers are experiencing an increasing sense of alienation. In conclusion, we elaborate these experiences theoretically and paint a picture of today's digitalized work environment in HE.

The article contributes to the academic discussion on Paulo Freire's pedagogical thinking as a basis for reinventing contemporary non-formal education. In Finland, Freire's transformational/liberatory theory of adult learning was applied as a framework for developing an adult educational model called Life Skills for All. The pilot project's case studies were carried out with different groups of people during the model's development phase. We describe these cases and discuss what can be learned from them for offering basic and life skills education for adult groups at risk of social disenfranchisement. Our case study analysis highlights some new practices and challenges based on the model's different applications. We argue that even for basic capacity building of employment skills, it is essential to develop a non-instrumental, holistic, and societal educational approach. Elements for such an approach can be derived from both the Nordic and Freirean traditions of adult education. Also, we suggest that the Life Skills for All model benefits learners' agency and empowerment by putting the learner at the center, combining the learning of different basic skills, and emphasizing the central role of the local community in participants' learning activities.

World-renowned educational theorist Paulo Freire has a decades-long legacy reaching all corners of the world. In this reception study, we ask, is there a Nordic Freire, that is, have the Nordic educators and scholars recognized Paulo Freire's works in the past decades? Our reception study's purpose is not to go into depth to Freire's thinking but ponder if there is a tradition of "Freirian" research and pedagogy in our Nordic country? Thus, we contribute to the understanding of Freire's legacy from the Nordic perspective. As an answer, we outline the trajectory of Freire's reception over the decades. Our historical and empirical analysis is grounded on our prior knowledge of the field and based on a systematic literature review and contemporary informants as our retrospective sources. We systematically searched and reviewed Finnish educational literature from the early 1970s to 2000s using literature databases. Secondly, we applied snowball sampling to find and contact Finnish veteran educational researchers and practitioners of adult education and gathered their autobiographical first-hand reminiscences of Freire's reception. Even if the direct impact has not been widespread and the proper academic research on Freire emerged belatedly, there have been many significant connections and echoes. Furthermore, we highlight that the Finnish educational system's renewal since the late 1960s was parallel to the Freirian spirit of educational, social justice. In conclusion, we suggest that by applying the Freirian approach, it is possible to develop critical literacy and a sense of initiative for the oppressed.

In this article we ask, what was Lenin's idea of education and learning and what was needed in developing revolutionary consciousness in the service of the emerging Soviet Union? We suggest that bringing Lenin's ideas of education and learning back into focus in educational theory, and especially in critical pedagogy, it is possible to search for alternatives to the present educational policies and unite the ninety-nine percent of the population against the tyranny of the one percent. The Lenin embraced in this article is molded in the lived reality of everyday life and in the human condition, and his message to the present is clear: there are only alternatives!

In this article we search for real utopias for higher education by first introducing and describing a vital counter-hegemonic students movement of the early 1960s--Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and their Port Huron Statement (1962). The movement maintained that universities are not communities of equals but served the elite. In the statement they highlighted the various socio-political problems within the United States that ought to be solved and demanded that higher education needed to be something more than a mere status and reproduction apparatus for the privileged. After describing the Port Huron Statement, we ponder its lessons and legacy as well as its implications for the present moment and for the future of higher education as a public good. We urge a new statement as a real utopia and an era of intellectual collectivism for today's students and their teachers--an era that would also cause them to embrace the greater world, to take a deep look at their own position in society, and look uncomfortably but hopefully at the world they will inherit.

This article is an ethnography of a student protest against a Finnish university's plans to give up 25 percent of its campus buildings until 2030. The Finnish universities faced financial deficits primarily due to education cuts implemented by Finland's right-wing government between 2015 and 2019. To balance the budget, Tampere University proposed surrendering some of its buildings, including the Linna, the home of social sciences, and the main library. The students organized the We Will Not Give Up the Linna Building movement (WWGU) to oppose the university's decision. This article is an ethnography of the movement's resistance and outcomes and analyzes what the student activists learned and how they changed during the protest wave in 2021. Our analysis uncovered six key insights the student activists learned on democracy, social media in activism, activism's temporality and persistence, the role of emotions in activism, and the university's power structures. The study contributes to a general understanding of the student protest movement, the social transformations that student activists undergo, and how they learn to perceive democracy, develop political imagination, and understand power structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an interview with Peter Mayo, author and expert in the field of sociology of adult education, on his major influences in this area, his books, and his views on the role of radical adult education and radical scholarship in the future. In the interview, Peter Mayo states that his initial view of adult education was quite a liberal one, and that his sociology studies began to draw him closer to writers in the radical and socialist tradition. His Ph.D. studies in Sociology in Education at OISE/University of Toronto continued to sharpen his knowledge of the area. He asserts that adult education has been overemphasized for work and more precisely for "employability," which does not necessarily mean employment. (Contains 4 resources.)

This article presents an idea of "digital social creativity" as part of social media and examines an approach emphasising openness and experimentation and collaborative learning in the world of information and communication technologies. Wikipedia and similar digital tools provide both challenges to and possibilities for building learning sites in higher education and other forms of education and socialisation that recognise various forms of information and knowledge creation. The dialogical nature of knowledge and the emphasis on social interaction create a tremendous opportunity for education, but at the same time form new hegemonic battlegrounds in terms of various uses of social media. (Contains 1 table.)

In this article, dedicated to the revolutionary educational work of Peter McLaren, we will deal with the question of practical teaching methods in higher education from the point of view of critical pedagogy. We argue that nowadays teaching and learning in educational and social sciences are too often meaningless from the point of view of critical collective learning. Thus the central task in critical pedagogy, and in reform of higher education, is to understand the oppressive aspects of present college life and overall society in order to generate pedagogical, individual and societal transformation while developing pedagogical strategies and study methods that work toward the elimination of various forms of subordination based on class, gender, race and sexual orientation, and strengthen students' possibilities for genuine collective learning while empowering them to fight against inequalities in the world. Our reflections stem from our academic life and teaching experiences both in Finland and the U.S. We suggest that in order to teach critically, educators need to use more collaborative and collective teaching and learning methods. Thus the idea of collective social expertise becomes a core aim of teaching in the context of critical pedagogy.

In this article, the authors argue for a leap from a "weak" digital literacy (skills of interpretation and strategies of reception) to strong digital literacy (authorship and autonomous skills and capacities). Strong digital literacy implies politico-structural analysis of the information societies to come. Given the current forms of economic production and corporate markets, the liberating and democratic potential of digital information is counteracted by the concentration of media ownership, as well as by policy, legislation, and the development of propriety forms of technology. The authors apply the concept of radical monopoly in analysing the possibilities of strong digital literacy in two contexts: education and computer software. In these, as in other areas, digital technology promises abundance, but only if the formal vision of the information society in the singular is overcome. This would not only mean interaction and authorship, but breaking the preconfigured bubble of racially monopolised information. (Contains 17 notes.)

Living social reality is always faster than any attempt to document it. Documentation will always remain inevitably partial. Critical leaders and teachers need to keep themselves sensible to those incidents which demand close attention in terms of social justice as well as emancipatory and revolutionary learning. "Revolutionary learning" refers to an important remark by Peter McLaren, who writes about such power/knowledge relations which critically reflect their own internal contradictions and give birth "not to an epistemological resolution at a higher level but rather to a provisional glimpse of a new society freed from the bondage of the past, a vision in which the past reverberates in the present, standing at once outside the world and beside the world, in a place of insight where the subject recognizes she is in a world and subject to it, yet moving through it with the power to name it extopically so that hidden meanings can be revealed in the accidental contingencies of the everyday." In this particular sense the new globally-driven social movements and international activism can play a powerful role in pedagogical "concientizacao"--in becoming conscious of the power/knowledge webs of global capitalism. In this article, the author documents recent anti-globalization protests in Gothenburg, Sweden, and discusses the recent political movements against economic globalization from a pedagogical point of view. The author wishes to address the power of the people, echoing the politics of these movements which operate both separately and in cooperation against the neoliberal global economic constitution. (Contains 37 notes.)

The conception of the good life in theoretical texts and adult learners' written narratives depicts well-being in terms of aesthetic experiences, values, existential experiences, autonomy, and significant others. Future prospects for adult education as legislative practice, as therapy and as commitment are derived from the discussion. (SK)